Most of my Offbeat Eats reviews happen because I just happened to find myself at the establishment in question. Either I’m traveling to that destination for another, non-food reason, or I was nearby and decided to pick something off my hit list. In other words, for most of these reviews I didn’t go out of my way to actually make a special trip for these places.

However, on occasion I do find myself doing a targeted trip for the express purpose of eating, or doing some sort of guided tour. Sometimes it’s driving to New York City just to do a pizza tour. Sometimes it’s a packaged food tour. And sometimes it’s even flying halfway across the country to drive several hundred miles visiting BBQ joints in Texas.

In any case, I made some special pages just for these trips:

Iceland: in August 2012, we spent 12 days driving and eating our way around Iceland, dispelling misconceptions about Icelandic food.

Random Post

As I’ve mentioned a few times, there are some gaps in the culinary coverage up here in Northern New Hampshire and Vermont. Several cuisines are nearly absent: there’s no Vietnamese, for example, between Manchester and Burlington, and I’m not sure I’ve ever seen an actual Cuban place closer than the Boston area. But one of the odder factors I’ve seen is that while there are quite a few Greek people living in New Hampshire, and even running restaurants, they usually don’t run Greek or even Middle Eastern restaurants, instead, they typically run pizza joints (often with the name “Pizza Chef” or “Village Pizza” as the name). I actually like a lot of these places (Grantham’s Pizza Chef, for example, has surprisingly good baklava, and Mexican Coke in the case). But sometimes I’m craving an actual Greek restaurant. Indeed, living in Michigan, Minnesota, or even Tennessee, it was never that hard to find a good gyro or souvlaki, but up here, it requires a bit of a drive (there are several good places in Manchester, like my already-reviewed Gyro Spot). But a few years ago, Claremont (which isn’t exactly a culinary Mecca), picked up an actual, honest Greek place: Elaini’s Greek Cuisine.